A Sense of Belonging
by CitronPresse
Summary: Mark contemplates his feelings for Lexie. Lexie opens up to Mark. Two ficlets. Pairing: Mark/Lexie.
1. Right

_Mark contemplates his feelings for Lexie._

* * *

She's curled on her side, one hand folded between her cheek and the pillow, the other resting on your stomach.

She sighs softly, smiles in her sleep, snuggles a little closer and burrows deeper under the comforter. She turns sleep into a pleasure, an active source of contentment.

You don't sleep as well as her. (Too many years of on-call rooms and pagers and sneaking out before you were called on not knowing someone's name). But your pleasure is in watching her, feeling her body against yours, knowing that this – you and her – is right and that you fit.

Before Lexie, bed was a place to pass out exhausted (or drunk); a place to fuck women you had no intention of holding in the morning.

You betrayed your best friend in bed. Then the woman you sold out your friendship for sold out your dreams, crying on the cold sheets next to you for a baby she wouldn't allow you to mourn with her, while you ached for a love you couldn't have (even if you'd known how to show it).

And much earlier, there was the dark - before you learned to turn on all the TVs – where the kind of dreams a little kid was supposed to have always turned into nightmares whose phantoms said way too much about your life when you were awake.

With Lexie, bed is the home you never really had. And if you don't sleep so well? Not really a problem. The reality of being with her is better than any dream you ever knew how to have.


	2. Sometimes Broken is a Good Place to Be

_Lexie opens up to Mark. (Written for the prompt: gray)._

* * *

Here's the thing. She can't always be peppy. It just doesn't work that way, even for an ex-prom queen.

But somehow she still feels bad when Mark comes home and finds her huddled in a blanket, sipping at scotch she doesn't even like, and crying until her eyes are red and sore but still full of tears.

"Hey." He sits down next to her on the couch, taking the alcohol away from her and pulling her into a hug. "What's wrong, beautiful?"

She tries to pull herself together. "I'm . . . I'm sorry. I just . . . the intern exam." It doesn't work.

She's supposed to be the optimistic one in all this; but today, she can't . . . she just can't.

He leans back to get a better look at her, brushing a little damp hair away from her face. "Lexie," he says, misunderstanding. "You have a photographic memory. You have that thing in the bag."

"Not the exam," she says. "The day. Tuesday."

The problem with a photographic memory is you remember all kinds of things you don't want to, as well as the things you need. She pushed it down for the sake of the test. But now that's, as he says, in the bag, there's nothing to push it down for and she can't. She doesn't want to.

A year ago today she sat in the car her mother used to drive, waiting for her father to emerge from saying drunken, hurtful words to Meredith. A year ago today she dug up a dead cat like a crazy person. Because she was crazy – with grief and dislocation and sheer disbelief at the way her life had suddenly broken in pieces. A year ago today she stood in the rain, in a cemetery and watched them bury her mother and she never got to say goodbye.

She can remember every moment, every raindrop, every sigh her father made, and when Molly cried on her shoulder, and the feel of the earth in the back yard. She can remember it all. Like it was yesterday. Like, in fact, it was today.

"She died," she murmurs into his chest, allowing the tears to fall. "And sometimes it's just too hard to be me. Sometimes I need to be a little . . ."

"Grey?" he offers, growling the word softly into her ear.

She loves him for it, because he gets a smile out of her while he's letting her know he understands.

"You can be broken, Lex," he says, serious again, all concern and firm, gentle hands. "You get a turn too."

He wraps the blanket around her and hugs her a little tighter, his body warm against hers, utterly protective.

She gives in. She can be broken sometimes. Because he loves her enough to let her.


End file.
